


shout it out

by words-writ-in-starlight (Gunmetal_Crown)



Series: the good left undone [2]
Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Abuse of Greek Myth References, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Classical References, Depression, Grantaire Angst, I mean it's Les Mis so pining Grantaire and Classical references are par for the course, M/M, Painting, Pining Grantaire, Slow Burn, Unreliable Narrator, sorry y'all, you know why i'm sorry you KNOW, Éponine Thenardier Adoration Society
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-30
Updated: 2018-04-09
Packaged: 2018-07-19 07:57:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7352572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gunmetal_Crown/pseuds/words-writ-in-starlight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Grantaire is being stalked by a girl he knew for about a minute and a half, two centuries ago.  He's oddly okay with this.  He's less okay with her determination to drag him back to his friends and to Enjolras, whether he thinks it's a good idea or not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. home becomes a strange place

**Author's Note:**

> Lo and fucking behold, I feel like the most productive person in the world. Thank you so much to everyone who left comments on the first fic, I hope this one lives up to your hopes! All titles are from [The Good Left Undone by Rise Against](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70hIRnj9kf8) because...I say so.
> 
> All praise and curses be to my beta, enabler, and adored platonic soulmate, [ThoseWhoFavorFire](https://www.archiveofourown.org/users/ThoseWhoFavorFire/pseuds/ThoseWhoFavorFire), without whom none of this would be possible. In case anyone has had it up to the back teeth with the angst I tend to turn out, she writes happier stuff. Sometimes.

The only reason Grantaire doesn’t break his neck tripping over Eponine is because he has exceptional reflexes—two lifetimes of dancing, boxing, and fencing have kept him on his feet more often than not.  He pulls his head out of the clouds just in time to come up short behind her and reach out to tap her on the shoulder, clearing his throat pointedly.

“’Ponine, why are you stalking me?”

Is it stalking if she found him by accident the first time?  It wouldn’t have been too hard to figure out that he was an art student, he still had paint on his hands because he always does, these days.  He barely remembers the last time he was back at his flat for longer than it took to change clothes and shower, and he’s definitely slept in the studio a few times this past week.  He’s not sure if it’s his train wreck of a sleep schedule confusing him or if her presence really does make so little sense, but he’s pretty sure she was furious with him last night.  She shouldn’t be here, because he stands by what he said and because he doesn’t especially want to get punched in the face, and Eponine seems like she might have considered that as a course of action.

She stands up and smiles at him.  He doesn’t remember ever seeing her smile before, but then they weren’t close.  It’s feral, lethal, all her teeth bared and her red lips curled back.  Grantaire kind of wants to ask if he can paint her like that.  Possibly with a sword.

“Because,” she says, authoritative, as if that answers his question in literally any way.  “I think we could’ve been friends last time.  You need friends, you can start with me.”  Grantaire has a very bad feeling about where this is going.  “I’m going to convince you to change your mind about the others.  And there’s nothing you can do about any of it.”  Oh look, Grantaire was right. 

She pauses for a moment, and Grantaire can’t tell if she’s giving him a chance to respond or drawing it out to make a point.  If she expects a reply, she’s out of luck.  She slides her sunglasses down her nose—she must be hungover, and he remembers seeing her leave and collect shots as she went, so he’s impressed that she’s committed enough to this insanity to sit in the sun for what looks like a couple of hours.  It’s still kind of a strange feeling to be the one who isn’t hungover, even though he’s been better about drinking this time around.  Artists make even less money now than they did two hundred years ago, so he couldn’t support his usual alcohol interest regardless.

She gives him another feral, lethal smile, lined in red.  “Sound good?”

Grantaire takes a deep breath and forces his voice to stay as steady as possible.  “I meant what I said last night, Eponine.  They’re better off.”

“I meant what I said, too,” she says, and it sounds like she’s biting the end of each word off.  “They miss you.”

“They’ll get over it,” Grantaire insists, and, just like every time he thinks it, the idea hits him like a clean, swift punch to the center of his chest.  He’s been a coward two entire lifetimes, though, he’s going to do this thing for them even if it kills him.

“You’re not getting rid of me,” Eponine says, a muscle standing out at her jaw as she stares him down.  “At all.  So you can either talk to me or ignore me and explain to everyone why there’s an angry girl following you to all your classes.”

“Don’t you have class, too?”

“Not this week, there’s a conference.”

“How did you even find me?”

She shrugs.  “You know.  Some looking.  Some Google.  Figured if you were a painter still, you’d come by eventually.”

Grantaire groans and rubs his hands over his face—that was possibly a bad idea, he might have paint on his face now—and resists the urge to pull at his hair.  “Okay,” he says, pulling his hat out of a pocket and tugging the beanie on.  It’s dark green, the same color he used to wear last time around, because some things don’t change and he couldn’t quite bring himself to abandon it.  He saw Enjolras leading a protest on the news a while back, still wrapped in a bright scarlet coat.  “Fine.  I’m going to get coffee before I have to go back to the studio.  You’re paying.”

“Great,” Eponine says, perfectly serene now that he’s given in to the inevitable.  This woman, he reflects silently as she hooks her arm through his and pulls him away from the steps, is quite possibly an evil mastermind.

The coffee shop they end up at is the one he usually goes to, the one that caters largely to sleep-deprived art students with the occasional smattering of wayward science majors.  They hand him a large black coffee without missing a beat and Eponine gets a latte.  The gangly boy behind the register puts a heart in the foam, and blinks at her, doe-eyed, and Eponine doesn’t seem to notice.

“So,” she says once they’ve claimed a table neat the window, where they can see people passing by in a steady stream.  “You remember.”

“Eponine,” he sighs.

“Hey, I’m just making conversation,” she says, holding out her hands.  “I was serious.  I think we could’ve been friends, I want that, this time.”

“You want to be friends,” Grantaire repeats, flat.  “With me.”  Out of all the options available, he would have thought he would be at the bottom of the list.  She and Feuilly, or Jehan, maybe.  He can picture her laughing with Joly and Bousset, comparing stories with Bahorel, letting Courfeyrac drape himself over her shoulders when he’s drunk.  Musichetta, from Joly and Bousset’s stories, sounded charming, why not her?

“Yeah,” she says, unmoved, and he blinks at her.  “So come on, what’s the story, how’d you remember?  Musichetta punched Joly in the face and screamed at him in a coffee shop, I think that’s still the most impressive one, you’d be hard-pressed to top it.  Feuilly came close, though, he got Bahorel pretty good, and I threw Marius over my shoulder.”

“How did you remember, then?” he shoots back, defensive, and she smiles a little.

“I was hit with a stone,” she says wryly, touching the place where the bullet had gone in between her ribs.  “And it was raining.  It was a long day all around.  I was ten”

He traces a circle on the table, looking down at the smooth false granite, and sighs.  “I was thirteen and I was in a history class,” he says, and she makes a sympathetic hiss.  He glances up, feeling a slightly rictus smile stretch his lips.  “I—there’s this painter, you know, pretty obscure, no one knows who he was, but he has some paintings of the students who died in our rebellion.”

“You,” she says, and he nods, eyes flicking back down.

“There’s this one of Enjolras,” he continues, voice dropping into a murmur.  “I painted it after one of our fights, meant to destroy it after…well, after everything.  Didn’t get around to it, obviously.  But so when I was thirteen, I turned the page in my textbook and there was this painting, down in the corner, with a little caption about the leader of the rebellion and the unknown painter and…yeah.”  He trails off, shaking his head, and takes a drink of his coffee for something to do.  “I’d’ve thought I was going insane if I hadn’t drawn the rest of you before I found the other paintings.”

“ _Righteous_ ,” Eponine says, and he looks up again.

“Yeah, that’s the one.”  It was one of the only times he felt like he’d been able to capture some miniscule part of Enjolras’ fire on the page.  It’s kind of terrible, that the paintings survived, that there are whole generations of people who saw them and knew what the painter felt for the man in the red coat.  Then again, it seemed like half of Paris had known, two hundred years ago.  It’s not like it’s much of a change.  Grantaire dredges up a smile for Eponine and teases, “You don’t strike me as the artistic type, though, ‘Ponine.”

“Oh, no, I’m not,” she says, sipping at her latte.  “But we have that one.”

“Excuse me?”  He’s hallucinating, he thinks numbly.  She can’t mean what he thinks she does.

She looks totally disinterested as she says, “The painting.  Two of them, actually, that one and _Apollo at Temple_.  One of your sketchbooks, too, the one you tried to burn before Jehan stopped you.”  He remembers that sketchbook.  Jehan had seen him toss it into the flames, and had come away with a burn down the length of his arm saving it.  Grantaire had never seen the poet quite so angry before, nor after.  “Actually, Marius has them, because he’s the only one of us with the money to pick them up at auction.  You should be pretty satisfied, by the way, there was a hell of a bidding war, you’re considered ‘classic’ and ‘unique.’”

Actually, Grantaire knows that.  He doesn’t agree, but he knows, because he’s an art student and he took a class on French art during the nineteenth century, and there was an entire excruciating week on the unknown painter R.  He spent the entire time torn between laughing his head off at everything—there were a number of theories that R was a woman, based on the paintings of Enjolras, which was _hilarious_ —and wishing he could melt straight through the floor.  The fact that his work is known to anyone, when he barely let his friends see his sketches, is quite possibly one of the worst things about his life.

On the other hand, he doesn’t know if the June Rebellion would have been remembered at all without his paintings, and the thought of Enjolras and Les Amis fading so completely into obscurity is so painful he can hardly breathe.

“Why?” is all he can finally think to say.

Eponine sighs, leaning forward and resting her chin on her fist.  “I don’t know, we just kind of…couldn’t not.  Because they’re us, from back then, something real to prove we were there.  Just in case you ever wanted them, once we found you.  In case we ever forgot how terrible Jehan’s clothes were,” she adds with a snort.

“Are they still?” Grantaire asks, a grin flashing onto his face.

“Oh God, so bad,” she says, affectionate.  “He wore these neon green shoes until they absolutely begged for death.”

“Does he still write poetry?”  She hums, nodding, and he smiles.  “What about you, this time around, Jondrette girl?”

The derisive sound Eponine makes turns his smile into an outright laugh, and God, it feels amazing.  It’s been…too long, maybe, since he really laughed with someone.  She grins broadly, chuckling.

“I grew up with Cosette again,” she says.  “We got along a lot better this time, she’s my best friend.  Gavroche stayed with me, when I moved out, we don’t steal anymore.  Well,” she corrects, eyes dancing, “Gav still picks pockets when he’s bored, but he doesn’t keep any of it.”

Grantaire isn’t especially good with kids—he’s not _bad_ with them, he’s an artist, he can make friends with almost anyone under the age of ten just on that fact alone—but he misses Gavroche.  He must be almost an adult by now, if Eponine is in college.  (Their ages don’t seem to have come out exactly the same, because Eponine was younger last time—late teens, not early twenties.)  There’s a sketch of Gavroche somewhere in the half-burned sketchbook, he thinks, of the boy decked out in a tricolor cockade and grinning like a devil.

“Are you a student?” Grantaire asks.

“Yeah,” Eponine says, and Grantaire used to deal with Enjolras daily, he recognizes the fire in her eyes and the way she straightens up.  He settles in with a smile as she starts to talk.  Eponine is a journalism student, with a photography minor, he learns, and she loves her work with a ferocity that doesn’t surprise him.  She talks about _showing_ people the problems with the world, about being able to bring it home for them with words and pictures, with vigor and electric determination.  Her pet project, unsurprisingly, is children in abusive homes and the failings of services meant to defend them, but her world is bigger than it was last time, and she hits everything from starvation in India to the Zika virus in South America in under thirty minutes.  He hardly needs to reply, just hum with interest any time she pauses for breath and sip his coffee.

Grantaire can think of maybe forty different cutting comments that he could make and, under other circumstances, _would_ make, but instead he keeps his mouth shut and nods along.  It’s too good, sitting with someone else whose speech sometimes takes a sharp and sudden turn for the archaic, listening to someone talk about making the world a better place.  And besides, Eponine isn’t Enjolras.  She never could be, because she knows too much of the world’s grisly underside to be such an idealist.  She talks about proof, about building up a case that someone else might be able to take further, about how, at the very least, there will be evidence of what happened.  She talks, he thinks quietly, like someone who died in a rebellion that was almost forgotten.

“Why are you smiling like that?” she asks at last, once she’s wound down her rant.

“No reason,” he says, waving it away.  “Been a while since I listened to someone plan to change the world, that’s all.”

“I’m not going to change the world,” Eponine scoffs, an edge of cynicism working its way into her voice.  “I’m not naïve, Grantaire, it’s not about some grand revolution in the way people think, it’s about… _showing_ them that these things exist.  Making sure someone knows.”

“Someone?” he repeats, and she nods sharply.

“Anyone.  Because I’m not the world-changing kind, but there’s always another Enjolras looking for a cause.”

“I don’t know,” Grantaire says dryly, finishing his coffee.  “Apollo’s one of a kind.”  She laughs, a full-throated and happy sound, ruffling a hand back through the short crop of her hair, and chugs the last of her cooling latte.  She’s much more vibrant, this time, more _real_ , not the dream of a wild girl pining over the ideal of a gentle boy.  He always thought of her as Echo, before, fading away into just a voice, just a body to take a bullet, but this time she’s alive and loud and driven, and it’s beautiful.  He’ll have to come up with a new metaphor for her, something sharp and bright and hard as moonlight.

“So,” she says once they’ve thrown away their cups, looping her arm through his again and bouncing a little beside him as they walk out into the sun again.  “What are we doing now?”

“I need to work on my final project,” Grantaire says, and she starts to get a stubborn look in her eye as if foreseeing his half-considered plan of ditching out a studio window.  This woman is Gavroche’s sister, though, and she ran with Patron-Minette once upon a time—he’s pretty sure he’d need to straight-up walk through a wall in order to get away from her.  He puts a pin in his thoughts of escape and instead takes a deep breath and, knowing exactly how awkward he sounds, offers, “If you wanted, I guess you could…come with me?  It’ll be pretty boring.”

“I have a smartphone with the Kindle app and Netflix and headphones in my pocket, I think I’ll be okay,” she says and he sighs, letting her steer him back toward the studio doors.

Grantaire’s studio is nice, if he does say so himself.  It’s still a student space, obviously, but he’s in his last year and that means he gets a private studio with a locking door and windows.  It’s small, but that’s all right, he’s not bothered.  There’s an easel, a stool for either visitors or models, a couch currently covered in miscellaneous detritus and only a couple of bottles, and he ended up with windows that shed beautiful swathes of sunlight through the room throughout the afternoon, so he can live with ‘small.’

He forgot, though, that there are three canvases leaned against the wall to finish drying, a fourth partly finished on the easel, and a fifth draped in a heavy white cloth in a corner.  Ah, well.  Eponine will have seen his work before, and all save the one under the cloth are for his project anyway, eventually destined to be public access for the final showing.

“Grantaire,” she says, drifting over to the paintings against the wall.  “These are amazing.”

“Thanks,” he mutters, tugging his beanie down self-consciously.  He’s been using a different style from the one he used in his last life, and he sort of misses the warm and impressionistic feel, but his teacher is a bit of a fanatic about the mystery painter of the June Rebellion.  It’s easier to alter his style a little, make it more photorealistic with less of a dreamlike appearance, and claim that R was an influence than explain the perfect match to her.  He’s perfected the science of getting out of range as soon as she starts in on her theories, because in his first year he sat through four.  All were very detailed and meticulous, and under any other circumstances he’d be flattered that someone cared so much, but it’s uncomfortable beyond words to listen to lengthy hypotheses about one’s own sex life.  Of all the paintings that could have survived, it had to be the ones that could only be made more obvious by Grantaire writing ‘I was in love with this man’ along the bottom edge.

Eponine crouches down, peering closely at the oldest painting.  It’s not signed—his name is on the back of the canvas, but it feels wrong to write ‘Grantaire’ in the lower corner rather than the capital R—and it depicts two men dressed in Greek chitons, one of them half-sprawled in the other’s lap, a snake wound around his ankle.  He is clearly dead or dying, and the other man is bent over him in grief.

“Who…?” she asks, looking up at him as he prods the easel into a better position.

“Orestes and Pylades,” Grantaire says without looking at her.  “Ancient Greek heroes.  Orestes was killed by a snakebite.”

“And they were…?”

Grantaire gives her a wicked grin.  “Depends on who you ask.  As usual.”

“And this one?” she asks, moving to the next painting over.  This one pictures a weeping man with dark hair and beard, dressed in Grantaire’s intensely researched approximation of a Roman emperor’s toga, cradling the drenched body of a younger man with golden hair on the bank of a river.  The painting is alight with sun and water, with an Egyptian barge in the ancient style off to the side, but the two central figures are alone.

“Emperor Hadrian and his lover Antonius on the bank of the Nile, which is _common knowledge,_ by the way,” Grantaire says, taking a critical look over her shoulder.  “I could have done better on the water, I--”

The look she shoots over her shoulder is downright poisonous, and he shuts up.

“This one,” she says at the third, “even I recognize.  Alexander the Great, right?”

“Yeah,” Grantaire confirms, grinning at her.

“And guy-whose-name-started-with-H,” she continues, and he makes a pained noise, offended on behalf of the person in question.  “Not all of us are Classically educated fonts of philosophy, Grantaire,” she says.

“This isn’t philosophy!” he protests, waving a hand broadly.  “Orestes and Pylades are obscure, I’ll grant you that, but Antonius was deified after his death, and Alexander the Great ruled a not-insignificant part of the Western world, he _shaped_ history.  Hephaestion’s death--”

“Right, Hephaestion,” Eponine says, and Grantaire brings his tirade up short, catching the corner of a smile.

“Are you fucking with me?” he asks, suspicious, and she blinks up at him blithely before turning back to the painting.  Her fingers hover just above the image of Alexander, fair head bent to rest face-down on a bier holding Hephaestion, his fists clenched in the dead man’s tunic.  The interior of the tent is illuminated in torchlight—Grantaire flatters himself that he’s not half bad at torchlight, probably as a relic of having learned to paint before the advent of electricity—and almost bare, the only details the carefully rendered folds in the tent shell.  Alexander’s clothes are visible disheveled and torn, his hair wild, every line of his body is tense and twisted.  Hephaestion’s deathly calm face and hands folded neatly beneath his ribs are a stark contrast, one that Grantaire is reasonably satisfied with.  He has complaints about all of the paintings, because he always does, but that part at the very least came out as he had hoped.

Her fingers drop down from Alexander to the floor.  “They’re beautiful.  Tragic.”

“That’s the idea.”

Eponine unfolds herself and gestures to the canvas on the easel.  “What will that one be?”

Grantaire looks at the canvas, where only the rudimentary colors and shapes have been blocked in over the sketch.  “Achilles and Patroclus,” he says quietly, humor gone.  He doesn’t feel compelled to over-examine his attachment to the story, but if pressed, he might make a few vague comments about dying for a cause not one’s own, and about the problems with loving someone who’s in love with a war.  As such, he’s generally relieved when no one asks.  “The centerpiece, given that they’re the best known story.”

“What are you calling the collection?” Eponine asks.

“ _Philtatos_ , or _Carissimus_ ,” Grantaire says immediately.  He’s had the name planned since the beginning, because he has a point to prove.  “They mean ‘beloved’ in Greek and Latin.  I got in a fight with someone about same-sex romance in the ancient world,” he offers as an explanation, and she laughs.  “You don’t just disagree about Achilles and Patroclus,” he continues, scowling at the memory.  “It was almost universally accepted historical fact for centuries—Xenophon doesn’t get a vote because he’s _Xenophon_ and believed in oligarchy,” Grantaire adds, distaste dripping from his words.  “So…this,” he says, because there’s a longer rant he could go into, but he came up with it while he was drunk and therefore it spirals around quite a bit before it makes any point at all.

It would doubtless be a nuisance, is the thing, and Grantaire finds that he’s reluctant to make a nuisance of himself, with Eponine watching him with that steady gaze.  He’s apparently stubborn enough to stay away from Les Amis, but too much of a coward to force her—and them—to leave him alone when she’s _right there_ , even though he knows it would be better for them.  He isn’t surprised by this revelation, but he had hoped otherwise.

So he lets her perch on the stool and lean against the wall, her phone in her hand as he clips a few more reference photos to the easel and goes back to painting.  Oil paints are his favorite medium, and he cheerfully blew several paychecks on the supplies for this project—he’s less of a drunk this time around more due to lack of funds than anything, he can admit that.  He hums quietly as he works, layering paint over the harsh blue base of the painted sky until it shimmers at the horizon, the sun vicious and cruel on the sandy camp he’s blocked out on the ground.  The tune is only vaguely familiar to him, one of many from their first life that he knows but can’t recall the lyrics to, something with a strong drumbeat and a rousing anthem-like feel to it.  He feels like it’s even odds on the song being some battle hymn that he picked up at the Musain or a drinking song from the Corinthe.

Eponine is a strangely restful presence, for all that she comes off like a hurricane when she’s talking at someone.  She basks in the sun pouring through his windows as it passes noon and makes the occasional remark about something on her phone—there’s been a train crash, there’s been news about the World Cup and does Grantaire know how far away that is, there’s been another shooting in America, there’s been a celebrity marriage that has everyone very excited and can Grantaire please tell her who these people are.  He doesn’t need to answer so much as indicate that he’s heard her, and she’ll make a few comments or jokes before returning to silence.  She hears him switch to a song she remembers and says something about Montparnasse having aspirations toward being able to sing, and then demonstrates that she knows the lyrics by providing vocals for his harmony.  She has a lovely voice, low and just this side of husky, and a good sense of pitch, so when she transitions from the old street cant to a modern rock song he does the same without complaint.  It’s been years since Grantaire put any effort into his voice, but he can still hit notes easily enough, and they match up well.

He expected the day to be nothing but fending off her entreaties to come see the others, but by the time the sunlight has turned red and Grantaire is starting to remember that he hasn’t actually eaten all day, and that coffee will only go so far to replace caloric intake, she hasn’t brought it up once.  In fact, the closest she’s come to even discussing them is teasing him lightly about his accidental fame, and the infrequent remark about what this or that person might say about something.  He wonders if that’s how it is with Les Amis these days, all blithe blending of lifetimes. 

She hasn’t distracted him, just provided a soothing level of background noise while he worked and, when he blinks himself out of the fixated headspace he gets after painting all day, he’s startled to find that he’s made quite a lot of progress.  He doesn’t remember the last time he spent so long in the company of a single person and felt so at ease.

“So,” she asks once it’s become clear that he’s packing up for the moment.  “What are we doing for dinner?”

Grantaire shrugs.  “I’m not picky, but it’ll need to be cheap.  I spent most of my money on paints and canvas.” 

“Wonderful, I spent most of my money on my camera and prints, so we’re in it together,” she says, and slides off her stool like a cat.  “Do you mind if I look under this?” she asks, reaching out to grip the white cloth over the painting in the corner.

Grantaire hesitates for a moment, uncertain, but she’s already pulling the cloth free, as if knowing that he’d stand there trying to decide all day if she let him.

“Oh,” she says, and he hunches his shoulders, wishing he could retreat into them, wishing he had something to drink and hide behind.  He can see the painting past her, and he sees her raise a hand to press against her lips, trembling.

“I can’t…show it to anyone here,” he says, the words awkward on his tongue.  “I painted it like I used to, so.  People would have concerns.  Identical painter’s fingerprint, you know.  I can’t sell it, either, not that I would really want to, and no one would want to buy it.  I’ll probably just end up burning it like I used to, it was a waste of paint, a stupid indulgence of sentiment--”

“R,” Eponine says, very calm and very quiet, and turns to give him a glare made no less intimidating by the tears clinging lightly to her lashes.  “If I find out you’ve so much as brought a matchbox into the same room as this painting, I’ll put a knife through your hand.”

He shuts up so fast he almost bites his tongue in half, and she goes back to the painting.

“He told us a little bit of how it happened,” she says, soft, almost a whisper.  “Not a lot.”  Her fingers trace the line of Enjolras’ arm, outstretched toward the floor, to his hand, still joined with the other.  In the painting, Enjolras is already dead, nailed against the wall of the Musain with eight bullet-born rosettes marking the white of his shirt and mingling with the red of his coat.  His head is lowered, gold curls loose over his shoulders after the battle, but the trace of a smile is still on his lips.  The flag is a pile of fabric beneath his free hand.  Grantaire, at his feet on the ground, lies in a pool of blood, but his eyes remain on Enjolras, his hand still clasped in his, as Grantaire had kept it until his strength was gone.  For all the grim subject matter, though, the painting is warm, glowing with light, Enjolras haloed, and, for possibly the first time in his memory, Grantaire’s painted self is within the fall of light.  Eponine’s fingers graze just above the flag, Grantaire’s face, Enjolras’ shoulders—she obviously knows too well to touch the paint, but she seems enthralled.

 “Is this how it happened?” she asks, fingers lingering over Grantaire’s open eyes, still alive in the scene captured in the painting.

“Yeah,” Grantaire says quietly.  “I remember.  It was the only thing I did right in that lifetime.”

“You loved him a lot, didn’t you,” she says, still looking at the painting and granting him the relative luxury of being able to pretend that he can keep his face passive.  “Not—not like I thought I loved Marius.  I barely knew Marius, not enough to love him.  You really loved him.”

Grantaire sighs.  “I did.  Even when I was at my most worthless and he was furious with me.  I still do.  If I could stop, I would, but it seems that it’s my lot in life.”

“And does this one have a name?” she asks, looking back at him at last. 

Grantaire’s lips curve into a faint smile.  “ _Do You Permit It_ ,” he says, and she nods, straightening up and draping the cloth over the painting again.  He can’t tell if she knows the phrase, if Enjolras told them, but she doesn’t say anything else on the matter.

The ability to leave well enough alone isn’t something he expected her to be possessed of.

She loops her arm through his again, and draws him outside, ignoring the fact that his hands and forearms are smudged with blue and bronze and gold and he’s probably getting it on her clothes as well as his own.  Once they’re outside in the setting sunlight, she squints up at him and snickers, reaching up and poking him in the cheek.  From the tell-tale crackling sensation, he gathers that he’s got paint on his face—he almost always leaves the studio with paint on his face or in his hair, occasionally both.

“You look like a modern art piece,” she says.  “A Van Gogh.  Maybe the one with the flowers.”

“Van Gogh painted a number of still lives of sunflowers,” Grantaire says, mock insulted, “and also he was Post-Impressionist.  Didn’t you have to take some kind of art history class for photography?”

“Sure, you look like a Post-Impressionist art piece, then,” she says, in the sort of tone that suggests that she is not listening to him at all.  “I was thinking that little Chinese restaurant for dinner, you know the one?  With the potstickers?”

“Mm-hm,” Grantaire says, letting her tug him along as he rubs half-heartedly at the paint on his cheek.  From the smirk she keeps shooting him, he’s pretty certain he’s just smearing it around, possibly with a nice second layer of color.  “The beloved staple of the university, cheap food that still delivers to student housing.”

“I haven’t eaten there in _months_ ,” Eponine moans, leaning her head against his shoulder, the very picture of the swooning maiden.  “Bousset got food poisoning there a while back and of course Joly would rather jump off a cliff than go back.  We can’t figure out how it happened, though, because Musichetta ate some of everything Bousset had and she was fine.”

“Glad to hear things are still _status quo_ with those three, then,” Grantaire says dryly.  “Never heard of someone getting food poisoning there before.”

Eponine shrugs.  “Bousset,” she says, like that’s enough to explain.  She’s not wrong.

They go to dinner.  The restaurant is cramped, but warm and clean and familiar.  The waiter obviously assumes they’re dating, places them at what is _clearly_ a couple’s table, with a candle in the middle and everything, and Grantaire manages to be solemn and polite until the man walks away.  Then Eponine catches his eye across the table, pillows her chin on both hands, and bats her eyes like a heroine from a bodice ripper, and Grantaire can’t _breathe_ for laughing.  She laughs too, the same warm ringing laugh from earlier, until her elbow slips off the table and she almost overbalances straight into the candle.  It takes them until the waiter comes back to collect themselves, Eponine’s cheeks flushed and Grantaire’s head lowered to the table top.  The man looks very long-suffering indeed as he waits for them to pull themselves together enough to order.

Eponine ends up with sweet and sour chicken, and Grantaire orders at random, something with a sweet-savory sauce and a lot of vegetables mixed in with large chunks of beef.  The food is rich and warm and good, and they eat with a surprising minimum of talk, because Grantaire, once he starts eating, discovers that he is ravenous, and it seems that Eponine does the same.

“So,” she drawls once they’ve blown through their food.  “What now?”

Grantaire stretches out an arm, sweeping his hand grandly through the air, and says, “Naturally I assumed that this is the part where you whip out a rag and a bottle of chloroform and drag my unconscious body off to see the others whether it’s a good idea or not.”

“Damn,” Eponine says, face perfectly flat.  “You’ve seen through my cunning plan.”  Grantaire grins, feigning a dramatic swoon, and hides the twinge of disappointment that rattles briefly through his chest behind it.  At least, if she was the one to drag him back, protesting all the way, he wouldn’t need to feel so guilty about returning against his better judgement.

“Well,” Grantaire sighs once his humor has faded.  “I suppose, barring that, we could go back to my flat and get inadvisably drunk on a Monday night.”

Eponine gives him a lazy grin and blinks at him, all wide dark eyes and wicked humor.  “Are you planning to take advantage?  Do I need a chaperone?”

Grantaire tips his head back and laughs.  He thinks he’s laughed more in the last day than he has in weeks.  “Sorry, Artemis,” he says, feeling unutterably fond.  “You’re not quite my type.”  He tosses a few notes onto the table to pay for the meal and offers his arm, which she takes cheerfully, pulling him outside.

“Not blond enough or not male enough?” Eponine teases, leaning on his shoulder.  He’s taller than her by a full head and then some, partly because she’s smaller than her demeanor suggests and partly because Grantaire is fairly tall when he bothers to stand up straight.  It works out to just the right height for her to curl around his arm and rest her cheek against his bicep, and he can feel her giggles through her chest as he steers them toward his run-down building.  It’s a bit of a ramshackle hellhole, if he does say so himself, but he ended up trading quality for proximity to the school, and his rent is manageable.

“The former,” Grantaire says, dry.

“That’s all right, R,” she says.  “You’re not exactly my type either—hey, did I get promoted?”  He hums inquiringly, scuffling through his pockets with his free hand until he comes up with his key, letting them into the building.  “Artemis!” she says.  “That’s a promotion, right?  And hey,” she adds as he nudges her inside and up the stairs, “why Artemis?”

“Because you’re too loud and angry to be anything except Apollo’s sister,” Grantaire says, and she cackles, delighted, over the sound of him unlocking the flat, and they spill inside.  She’s still grinning as she sweeps into his little kitchenette like she owns the place, returning with a bottle of whiskey he must have left out on the counter.  She drops down next to him on the floor of what passes for his living room, back to his crappy couch and brandishing the bottle like a spoil of war, and he can’t help but smile at her.

Eponine, Grantaire discovers, is a wonderful drinking partner, wry and dark and laughing, all too willing to wax cynical with him, but with an edge of gallows humor that he appreciates.  She stretches out on the floor, head on his leg, and tells him a story about a man who used to be named Thenardier, who sold his son and used his daughters, with an edge on her tongue and a thousand sneering remarks.  Her eyes glitter a challenge at him, daring him to pity her, and he grins back, wry and dark and laughing himself, and tells her a story about his own parents in return.  None of it is funny, but they’re leaning together and laughing anyway.

As they work their way through the bottle, the topic turns, wheels like a bird in the air onto lighter things, now that they’ve passed each others’ tests.  Eponine doesn’t seem to mind that Grantaire descends rapidly into obscure Classical rambling when he’s drunk, either.  She leans against his shoulder and asks the occasional question—when he admits that he used to call her Echo, in his head, she prods for more detail, and he ends up on a thirty minute rant about flower symbolism in the Greek myths, and she’s attentive the entire time.

“So,” she asks sleepily, somewhere north of two in the morning, “if I’m Artemis, and he’s Apollo, what does that make you?”

“Icarus, I think,” Grantaire half-laughs, derisive. 

“No,” she says thoughtfully, stroking her fingers through his riot of curls with remarkable dexterity for someone who’s been drinking slowly but steadily for some five hours now.  “I don’t think so.”  He hums, letting his eyes drift closed as she sinks her fingers into his hair, scraping lightly over the nape of his neck.  “Dionysus,” she decided after a moment.

Grantaire opens his eyes.  “Wine, revelry, and madness?”  He considers that for a few moments, makes a show of it, before nodding and saying, “I’ll grant you that one.”

They sit there for a few minutes, finishing the last of the whiskey with Eponine’s hand carding through Grantaire’s hair, until he catches her mid-yawn in the corner of his eye and pulls himself to his feet.  The room reels around him, but he focuses on Eponine with the ease of long practice.

“How are you so—not spinning?” she asks, looking up at him dolefully.

“One lifetime of genuine alcoholism and a second of heavy drinking.  Come on,” he says when she yawns again.  “You can use my bed.”

“I don’t want to kick you out of your own bed,” she protests immediately, like he knew she would, and he waves her words away like so many flies.

“Indulge my archaic concepts of chivalry and hospitality,” he says.  “I’d offer to share if it would make you feel better, but.”  He smirks and gestures at the narrow twin bed visible through the half-open door.  “There’s only really one way to share a bed that size, and I think we already established that neither one of us is interested.”

Eponine tries to maintain her glower, but breaks down into giggles in moments, letting him pull her onto her feet and steady her when she sways.

“All right,” she snickers, “just this once I’ll take ruthless advantage of the fact that we grew up before women’s rights were a twinkle in the general public’s eye.”  When he lets go of her shoulders, he expects her to wander straight into the bedroom, but instead she sails into the kitchen again, and emerges with his biggest mug in one hand and a cup in the other, both full to the brim with water.  “Drink,” she orders, pushing the mug on him with a no-nonsense sort of expression.  He stares at her for a moment, baffled, and she scowls, pushing the mug into his hands so that he has to either take it or get wet.  He opts for the former.  “For the hangover.”

“Oh,” he says, feeling the shock flit across his face.

“What, no one’s ever made you drink water for a hangover before?” she asks, arching her eyebrows at him.

He keeps his gaze on the water as he says, “Not—not these days.  Joly, or Combeferre sometimes.”  When he looks up, Eponine’s lips are thin, but he doesn’t press the point, which is another reason she’s wonderful, he decides.  She knows when to shut up and cut her losses.

“If your couch gains sentience overnight and tries to swallow you,” she starts once she seems satisfied that he is, in fact, drinking the water.

“Yell for help?” he guesses, lowering the mug, and she snorts.

“I was going to say ‘don’t wake me up,’ but do whatever you’ve got to do, I guess.”

She drinks her own cup of water like someone dying of thirst and leaves him there.  He’s still laughing when he hears her hit his mattress.


	2. haven't slept in so long

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So...
> 
> I'm here. Again. I slammed through writing the second half of this chapter in the last twelve hours and I'm posting it and I'm just...so sorry. It's been almost two years since this fic updated, but as promised, I've not abandoned it and I am still here and to those of you who have still been loyally commenting, I love you so much, you're great people, I love you.
> 
> Also, on a strictly narrative level, I hope it's clear that this is from Grantaire's point of view and his self-image is. Uh. Flawed, shall we say. 
> 
> And agathaire on Tumblr made me [this gorgeous fanart](http://words-writ-in-starlight.tumblr.com/post/155895732685/agathaire-a-few-scenes-from-this-fic-by) of Eponine in _a flower at my feet_ and of Grantaire in his studio, just so that I could feel, you know, guiltier about myself.

There is a hand slipping out of his, and it’s the only thing that matters.  Blood is soaking into cloth, staining white shirtsleeves and green waistcoat alike.  It trickles a hot line down the center of his chest to pool at the hollow of his throat, some great weight crushing the air from his lungs as the room crumbles around him.  There’s a deafening roar of noise in his ears, like cannon fodder, ringing on and on and on.

But that doesn’t matter.  What matters are long fingers and a fine-boned wrist and strong tendons beneath smooth skin, and the hand is slipping, his grip is weak, too weak, and the hand is _slipping_ and _—_

“Grantaire,” a voice says sharply, and a hand lands heavily on his chest, over his heart.

Grantaire gasps awake, fighting for air, and the voice says his name again.  Éponine, right, that voice is hers, Éponine is here, it must be her hand on his chest, but where is…

“Enjolras?” he forces out past the knot of panic in his throat.  His hand aches, as if he pressed his palm against hot metal and is suffering the dull throb of a burn.

“No,” Éponine says, sounding shaken but carefully steady.  Her hand disappears from his chest and she fumbles audibly for a light as Grantaire sits up, curled around his hand with his legs tucked up, and tries to remember how to breathe.  Damn everything, he thinks sourly.  One would think that after the first few years of the nightmares, their effect would lessen, but here he is, shuddering as each inhale drags roughly in his throat.  The light, when she manages to flick it on, is blinding, but it’s better than the dark, which is all too like the dark behind his eyelids.

Éponine’s face is rather suddenly close to his, her clear dark eyes fixed on him.  He manages to strangle down another desperate query—he _knows_ Enjolras is alive, damn it, there’s no reason for this terror—but it’s a near thing.

The touch of her fingers on his cheek makes him start, two scraping across the stubble on his jaw and the others sliding across his skin as if through water.

“You’ve been crying,” she says quietly, and when he blinks, he feels the slide of another tear drop from his eyelashes, hot and heavy against his skin, like blood.  “Do you know what century it is?” Éponine asks.

Grantaire makes himself nod, feeling the muscles in his neck creak in protest as if he’s trying to bend old, strong oak.  “I’m all right,” he says and scraped a hand over his face, squeezing his eyes closed to make himself stop crying and ignoring the dull throb still gnawing at his other palm.  His voice shakes terribly, and Éponine looks like she’s so far past unconvinced that someone will need to create a new word accordingly.

“How often do you dream about it?” she asks bluntly, because if there’s one thing that’s become clear over their day of modern friendship, it’s that Éponine doesn’t believe in tact any more than she did in their first time around.  Grantaire coughs out a bitter laugh before he can stop himself, old and mocking words rising to his lips, close to the surface in the wake of the dream.

“But Artemis,” he says, feeling his voice fall into the cadence of the old days, “you are so all-knowing, why should I need to tell you that?  You already know any other secrets I could dream up to tell you, what claim do you make on this one?  Can you not look into my eyes and steal the information right out of my thoughts?”

Éponine’s hand doesn’t quite hit him hard enough to hurt, but the feel of it cracking against the back of his head is a sharp jolt to his system anyway.  “Don’t be a dick,” she says with a scowl.  “I’m trying to help here.”  She pauses for a moment, takes a breath, and adds, “You’re not the only one who has bad dreams, R.”

The old nickname does more to calm him than anything else, the weight of it settling the fractured timelines in his memory into something more orderly.  His next breath comes easier, and Éponine’s fingers touch his cheek again, briefly, before she sits back.

“Sorry, ‘Ponine.”

“It’s fine,” she says.  “We all have them.  Less, now.”  She touches her belly, the soft skin beneath her ribs, and Grantaire doesn’t remember seeing her die, but he recognizes the careful aim.  “Sometimes after I have one, I can’t go out into the rain,” she admits, and Grantaire sits quietly, feeling the weight of her honesty settle on him like a thick blanket.

“Why?” he asks when it seems that she’s not certain how to say more.

Éponine wraps her arms around her knees, weary and rumpled.  “It was the blood.  I thought it was raining, after I was shot.  I know it wasn’t, but I never quite managed to get rid of the association.”  There’s another moment of heavy silence before she breaks it by looking at him and asking again, “So, how often do you have nightmares?”

“Couple times a week at the worst, few times a month at best,” Grantaire murmurs.  “It’s not always the Musain.”

“The Musain?”

He clenches his aching, empty hand into a fist, and sees Éponine catch the movement.  “I was holding his hand, when we died,” Grantaire says—or tries to say.  It comes out like a cracked whisper and for a dreadful moment he thinks the ache in his chest is trying to crawl up his throat and turn into tears.  Éponine doesn’t comment, doesn’t ask who _he_ is, and Grantaire wishes distantly that he’d known her last time.  Under all the tangled mess of her last lifetime, she’s pure steel, forged and tempered into something unbreakable.  Maybe that’s why Grantaire keeps talking.  “He died quickly—eight bullets.  I…didn’t.”

“That’s why you’re still holding his hand in your painting,” Éponine says, even, and he nods slowly.

“I was still…awake, I suppose.  Breathing.  I held onto his hand until…”  Grantaire shakes his head, can’t finish the sentence, and Éponine doesn’t ask him to.

What she asks instead is, “What was your nightmare?”

“The usual,” Grantaire says, and tries to make it sound careless.  It comes out flat, emotionless, and that’s almost worse than the cracked sound from before.  “I lost my grip.”

“But it’s not the only thing you dream about?”

Grantaire looks down at his lap.  “No.”

“Do you want to tell me the rest of it?”

“Not really,” he says, and offers her a crooked grin, snatching at a cord of black humor like a lifeline.  “I don’t need a therapist.”

“I beg to fucking differ,” Éponine says politely, and Grantaire is startled into a laugh.  “But,” she allows, grinning a little herself, “I’ll grant that trying to explain this to a therapist probably wouldn’t get you much besides a delusional diagnosis.”

“That’s the spirit,” Grantaire says, dry.  He lets out a slow breath and scrubs his hands back through his hair, feeling tangled curls catch at his fingers and yank at his scalp.  “Okay.  I’m going to go take a shower until I feel less like I’m going to have a panic attack.  Help yourself to coffee or whatever’s in the fridge.”

“Give me your phone,” Éponine says, and doesn’t move from where she’s sitting in a ball on the floor.  Instead she holds out her hand, palm up, with a stern arch to her eyebrows—like she’s reclaiming something that’s already hers rather than _blatantly_ commandeering Grantaire’s personal property.

He hands over the phone.

“Thanks, R,” she calls after him, voice bright and almost sing-song, and he waves her off as he closes the bathroom door behind himself.

Grantaire drops his clothes from yesterday on the floor without paying attention to where they land and cranks the water in the shower as hot as it will go, then steps in without caring if it’s warmed up.  It hasn’t, and the cold hits him like a slap—like a gunshot, he thinks with a deeply humorless laugh.  It clears the last clinging fog of the dream from his mind, though, and a few minutes of shivering under the slow-warming water even cure the ache in his empty hand.  As it warms, he feels the panicky feeling of the nightmare, staved off by Éponine’s level head and frankness, start to grip at him again, and he takes slow, shallow breaths.  Grantaire lists every shade of paint he has in his studio, from reds through purples, until his chest loosens and the water is starting to be unpleasantly hot.

Once he turns the water down to a more rational temperature, his shower is quick.  Grantaire is out in a handful of minutes, jittery on the adrenaline from the nightmare and the icy water, and only then realizes that he forgot to grab a change of clothes.  He could put his old clothes back on, but they have the tacky feel of slept-in day clothes, and he’d really rather not.

He debates it for all of a few seconds before he decides that Éponine was the one to invite herself over, so Éponine can be the one to deal with it.  Knotting a towel around his waist, Grantaire crosses the hall to his bedroom, where he finds Éponine sitting on his bed and methodically destroying his high score on Candy Crush.  He doesn’t want to think too much about how she cracked the passcode on his phone, and elects to put it out of his mind.  She looks more put-together than she did before, short hair finger-combed into order and her feet tucked neatly up underneath her, and she doesn’t do more than glance up and raise a couple fingers at him when he walks in.

“What are we doing today?” she asks.

“Don’t you have class?” he demands, pulling a shirt on and feeling it cling to the places where drops of water are still pearling on his skin.

“No,” she says, beating another level.  “Conference.  We discussed this yesterday.”

Grantaire makes an aggravated sound deep in his throat, yanking on boxers and a pair of shitty paint-splattered jeans before he drops the towel on the floor.  “Don’t you need to check on Gavroche or something?”

“That sounds like a great idea,” Éponine agrees, amiable.  “He’d love to see you.”

“What?  No, that’s not--”

“Not what you meant?” she asks, arching her eyebrows and managing to make her disdain clear even though she’s still apparently absorbed in the phone screen.  “Gav knows where I am, he was all for it.  He can take care of himself for a few days.  He has my number, my credit card, and a threat to dangle him out a window by his ankle if he uses it for anything except food.”

Grantaire blinks.  “Wait, seriously?”

“Yeah,” she says.  “I’m sure I’ll get back and he’ll have a brand new X-Box and the latest Assassin’s Creed game, so I’ll just throw him to Cosette and let her look disappointed at him.  Better than the window, for efficiency.”  She glances up at last, and cocks her head.  “So.  What are we doing?  Going straight back to the studio?”

“I—yes?  I have a final project due in…sooner than I’d like,” Grantaire hedges, because frankly he doesn’t have his life together at all and he’s going to be more or less living in the studio for the next week or two in the hopes that the final painting will be _mostly_ dry for the final showing. 

“Good.  Put on socks and we can go.  Also I’m taking your charger, I forgot to plug my phone in last night.”  Éponine glances up when he doesn’t immediately start moving to comply, and adds, “Unless you were hoping I was going to hit you with a frying pan and drag you off to the others unconscious in a sack?”

Grantaire looks down at his drawer of socks as if he needs to carefully select a pair, because…yeah, honestly.  He wants her to force him to see the others, so that he can have what he wants— _selfish_ , he tells himself harshly—without having to be responsible for it.  He’s pretty sure Éponine is onto him, but she doesn’t bring it up, and continues with her game on his phone while he spends all of two minutes trying to tame his curls before giving up and stuffing his beanie over the whole mess.

“Fine, okay, let’s go,” he says, absently checking his pockets for something he’s forgotten.  He can’t remember what it is.  “Where the fuck--?”

“Wallet.  Living room end table.”

“Thanks,” he calls, darting out and grabbing the thing as Éponine ambles out after him.  “You want coffee on the way?”

“Hell yes.”

And that’s how it goes.  Éponine is kind of great, Grantaire discovers over the course of the next two days of having her all but _soldered_ to his side, except for the one shift he takes, when she sits at the bar for all eight hours of it.  Well, he knew she was kind of great, that much was obvious even when she was nothing but poor lovelorn Echo, dying for a cause she’d never had a chance to believe in, but now—there’s something in her like titanium, as immoveable and secure as stone.  She built herself a solid place to stand out of nothing at all, and all she would need is a lever to move worlds.  It’s restful, oddly so, to be around someone who’s so absolutely confident that she knows every crevice of her own mind.

More than that, Grantaire discovers that he likes having company while he paints.  He’s never had it before, except in beginner’s classes during his first year of college, and that was uncomfortable and nerve-wracking every step of the way.  But Éponine likes to talk about easy freewheeling subjects, laughs when he mutters curses at his brushes and smudges paint on his face by accident, sits quietly when he’s focused on an important detail—and she still sings, and grins through the words when he hesitantly joins in.

Grantaire sings more than he has in years, with Éponine there.

It’s a strange kind of limbo, that they get into.  It makes Grantaire’s chest hurt, like his lungs are too full and pushing against his ribs, like he needs to scream or cry or laugh to lessen the pressure.  He can’t settle on one or the other, so he keeps his mouth shut, and every time Éponine casually mentions the others— _Courf is a Spanish major, do you speak any_ and _oh, God, Bousset walked into a lamppost last month and concussed himself_ and _hey, Feuilly actually got himself a scholarship this time around_ —the pressure grows, a sweet-sharp pain that he grows addicted to almost at once.  He thinks that he understands Éponine’s plan, to get Grantaire greedy for information about them and then start pushing for him to see them in person, and he’s a little shaken by how shrewd it is.  She’s a clever bastard, he’ll give her that.

The morning of the third day—the fourth, really, counting Éponine’s impromptu arrival outside the studio—they wake up in Grantaire’s bed, both still dressed from the night before and crammed together in defiance of the laws of physics.  Éponine is half-draped over Grantaire’s torso, because she’s a lot smaller than he is, and his back is bent into a question mark to keep from falling off the bed.  On the one hand, he’s not being turned into one long ache by his couch, which isn’t great for sleeping, and Éponine is light enough to make a very comfortable blanket.  On the other hand, he’s honestly not sure he’s physically capable of straightening his back anymore, possibly ever.

His crappy student’s apartment really isn’t equipped for visitors, and he idly thinks, blinking his eyes open and looking up at the ceiling, that he’ll have to fix that.  He’s never had to worry about visitors before.

“Stop thinking,” Éponine tells him, patting her hand over his face without opening her eyes, like she’s trying to hit snooze on an alarm.  “Unless you’re going to get me coffee.”

“I don’t know if I can stand up,” Grantaire says, and carefully stretches out as best he can.  His back gives a concerningly loud _snap_ , and some of the stiffness starts to disappear as a few more joints pop more quietly, and Éponine raises her head to give him a look, her eyebrows arched high.

“You okay?” she asks dryly.

“Stellar,” he says, and sits up.  Something at the small of his back goes _crack_ with the movement.

“Come on, old man,” she says, and stands up with far fewer sound effects, offering Grantaire her hand to drag him to his feet.  “Clothes, then coffee.”  Grantaire makes a disagreeable noise deep in his throat, but allows himself to be hauled upright before Éponine picks up her backpack and vanishes into his bathroom to get dressed herself.

They walk to the coffee shop, the one they went to that first day, and join a ragged line of, mostly, other students.  Grantaire recognizes three other people who have a piece to finish for the final show, all of them with the same worn, wild-eyed look in their eyes—the look of someone profoundly regretting not having gotten more done in the first semester, Grantaire knows it well.  Éponine seems mostly amused, rather than sympathetic, but admits freely that, “It’s not like I’m known for getting my articles written on time either.”  So Grantaire lets her laugh at him.

He’s debating whether he wants one shot or two of espresso when the voice takes him off-guard.

“Éponine!” someone at the door says in surprise, and footsteps move toward them as Éponine makes a sound of greeting.  Her voice is unreadable.  She might have rigged this, or it might be chance.

Grantaire doesn’t look back, and the ache in his chest turns into a sharp stab at the sound of the step-step- _click_ that he recognizes as a cane.  He closes his eyes and wonders if he has it in him to come up with an excuse and leave, or not.

“How did your exam go the other day?”

“It went great,” the voice behind him says brightly.  “Ninety-one percent on a biochemistry exam, I feel extremely competent.  I’m sure it’ll last until the next time I get an inorganic chemistry assignment.”

“So, next week.”

“That’s correct!”  The voice laughs and it’s—it’s wonderful, and Grantaire can’t breathe, the pressure in his chest is too much. 

Grantaire doesn’t have it in him after all.  He turns, hesitant, and opens his eyes to see a familiar narrow face creased into a broad grin, Éponine’s lips quirked up in amusement, and—wow.  He feels a little like he’s been sucker punched, now he _really_ can’t breathe, his head spinning dizzily with the shock of it.  It’s worse when the young man looks up at him and freezes, shocked delight washing over his face in place of the self-deprecating good humor.

“Hi, Jolllly,” Grantaire says with a weak attempt at a smile and a weaker still attempt at the old joke.  Joly stares at him, lips parted in astonishment as his eyes—dark, this time, not pale like they were before, but just as sparkling—roam over Grantaire’s face, almost hungry in their urgency, as if he expects Grantaire to bolt at any second. 

“ _R_ ,” he says, and his voice cracks badly over the single letter.  “I didn’t—hi.”

There’s a moment, a beat of stillness as they look at each other, as if they haven’t quite decided how this is about to go.  Joly’s torn between delight and an obvious fear that Grantaire is about to leave, the conflict written all over his face, and Grantaire just _aches_ , wordless and hopeless and bleeding out with it.

Grantaire breaks the stalemate first, because he’s always been selfish at heart.  When he hitches his bag a little higher on his shoulder and opens his arms, Joly falls into them so quickly that his cane clatters to the floor and Grantaire finds himself abruptly supporting Joly’s full weight while Joly buries his face in Grantaire’s hoodie and cries.  Joly is still short and bird-boned, so light that Grantaire could probably heft him up like a child and walk off with him, but his grip on Grantaire’s neck is like iron.

“I’m sorry,” Grantaire says helplessly, hugging Joly close.  Éponine, beyond Joly’s shoulder, is ordering their coffee and staring down anyone who seems confused by the tearful reunion.  There’s no help coming from her.  “I’m sorry,” he says again, for lack of anything else to say.

“You absolute _bastard_ ,” Joly says, and lands a punch on Grantaire’s ribs that’s not half bad and will probably ache for a few hours.  Stepping back and scrubbing at his face with one hand, he scowls fiercely up at Grantaire, wavering slightly on his feet.  Being glared at by Joly is still a little bit like being snarled at by a six ounce kitten—the intent is there but the execution falls short—but Grantaire feels a rush of shame nonetheless.

“I really am sorry, Joly,” Grantaire says.

“ _Stop_ being sorry, how could you think that we don’t want to see you?”  Joly’s hand, fisted in Grantaire’s shirt, gives him a surprisingly strong shake.  “I mean, _God_ , R, I’ve missed you so much.”

It’s more work than it should be, to force himself to grin nervously at Joly, and Grantaire’s chest is tight and painful, somewhere between joy so acute it hurts and the beginnings of a panic attack.  Joly’s eyes are still glittering and he’s smiling at Grantaire, like a kid on Christmas, and Grantaire—

Grantaire _hates_ himself.  The surge of loathing is so sudden and unexpected it hits him like nausea, crawling up his throat and twisting in his gut.  The coffee shop is too loud, too close, and Joly is _here_ , smiling, leaning on Grantaire like he used to, looking at him like he’s just had his best friend restored to him, and Grantaire doesn’t deserve that anymore, if he ever did.  He’s still the coward who stayed out of the fight that killed everyone he cared about.

“Grantaire?” Joly asks, concerned, because Joly is a good person and always was, with that open heart and need to save people.  He’s going to make such a good doctor, the doctor he should have had the chance to be last time.

The pain in Grantaire’s chest sparks bright and hot, and he steps back, bringing a hand up to break Joly’s grip.

“I’m sorry,” Grantaire says again, and shoulders through the crowd to slip out the door.  He thinks he might knock someone into the doorjamb as he passes, and mutters another apology, and then he’s outside and nothing is better.

He’s running again and he knows it, because that’s what he does.  He can hear Joly calling after him, through the tinny thunder of his heartbeat in his ears, and the press of disgust in his chest is so tangible it makes him breathless as he walks—he’s not even sure where he’s going, anywhere, just _away_ , away from _himself_ if he can manage it.  This is worse than avoiding them, this really does make him a monster, not quite strong enough to stick to his guns and remind them that he’s not worth their time, and Joly will hate him for doing this again. 

The thought should make him feel better—Grantaire _wants_ them to hate him, he’s told himself as much for years, ever since he didn’t have the courage to leave Paris—but instead it just makes him crave a drink, like a man dying of thirst craving water.  Wine, brandy, vodka, anything that will burn away reality for a few hours.  He remembers this feeling, always has, probably always will.  This feeling is the one that he caved to, the night before the barricades fell.

For a moment, the memory is so close and the nausea so intense that Grantaire worries he’ll be sick right there on the pavement.

By the time he realizes that he’s reached a building, he has half a plan to walk into his apartment and just work his way through whatever he can find in his liquor cabinet, and to hell with his final project.  But the building in front of him isn’t his apartment building, it’s the studio.

Grantaire walks inside anyway, numbly unlocks his private room and closes the door behind him, and sits down on the floor without taking another step.  It smells strongly of paint and turpentine—it reminds him a little bit of the tiny flat he lived in the first time around, when he spent all his money on paints and wine and burned half his work.  The familiar smell doesn’t do much for the pain in his chest or the bitter taste of guilt on his tongue, but it eases the gasping sense that he’s not getting enough air.

He’s not sure how long he sits there, staring at a point where the floor joins the far wall, the sun spilling more or less directly into his face, but he still feels numb, so numb that he doesn’t even jump when someone hammers on the door.

“Grantaire?  It’s just me.”

Éponine.  He should let her in.  He doesn’t get up from where he’s sitting against the door.

Another knock, lighter, a little more hesitant.  “I know you’re here, Grantaire, I’ve already been back to your apartment.  I just want to know if you’re okay.”

“I’m all right,” Grantaire says, barely more than a murmur, and Éponine sighs.  There’s a thud and he feels a weight hit the door, as if she leaned against it all at once.

“You drinking?”

“All I’ve got in here are my paints,” he says.  He knows with perfect clarity that the last bottle he had in his studio was emptied a week and a half ago, while he was trying to break through the artist’s block on the sketch for the Achilles and Patroclus painting.  Staying up until four in the morning with a bottle of scotch probably isn’t the healthiest solution to a mental block, but it’s never failed to work for him.

Grantaire wants to be offended—or maybe touched—that she’s worried about whether or not he’s drinking himself to death, but he can’t muster up the energy.  It’s a fair question.

“You want to open the door yet?” Éponine asks after a moment.  When he doesn’t answer that one, he hears her make a humming noise and say, “That’s fine.”

_That’s fine_.  Grantaire almost laughs at the absurdity of the comment, but chokes down the impulse at the last moment.  It’s not fine and he knows it.  He’s failing, yet again, at basic functioning, because he’s selfish enough to let Éponine keep hanging around, stupid enough to bolt from a coffee shop, and cowardly enough to refuse to deal with the fallout.  He was a shitty friend the first time around, and he’s—somehow—shaping up to be almost as bad this time, despite his best efforts to keep his distance.

“Joly’s okay,” Éponine continues, as calmly as if this is an everyday occurrence.  For a moment, Grantaire thinks she’s making the obvious point—your best friend is fine _if you care_ —but then she goes on.  “He’s not angry with you.  I told him that he should give you some space.  If you don’t want to talk to him, I’d like to tell him you’re all right.  Is that okay with you?”

“You mean you haven’t been keeping them posted on every detail?”  It comes out crueler than he means it to.

There’s a pause, and then Éponine says, “I’ve been telling them that you’re okay, and some other stuff about how you’re doing, but that’s about it.”

He can’t help himself, can’t do anything about the soft, ragged tone of his next question.  “What have you told them?”

“That you’re a painter again.  That you remember us.  That you still talk like you swallowed a dictionary when you’re drunk.”  A pause, and she sighs.  “That you’re lonely.”

“I’m not lonely,” he says automatically.

“When was the last time you saw someone outside of class or work, before me?”  He doesn’t answer—it’s been a long time.  Grantaire doesn’t often think of himself as lonely, just…alone.  Doing his penance, on his worse days.  On his better days, he can admit to himself that the people around him just aren’t as interesting as the ones he remembers.  “That’s what I thought,” Éponine says.  She knocks on the door again.  “Come on, R.  It’s almost lunchtime.  You’ve got to eat something.”

The idea of eating food makes him feel like his tongue is shriveling in his mouth.  The idea of talking to Éponine about what happened at the coffee shop feels worse, like he needs to peel off his skin until he finds a better person underneath.  He doesn’t understand why she doesn’t get where he’s coming from—doesn’t really understand why she’s _here_ , why she showed up and then _stayed_ when she’s not getting anything except frustration out of it.

“I need to get work done on my painting,” Grantaire says, instead of any of that.

“You’re not going to get any work done like this.  Come on.  Let’s go get lunch.  We can talk about something else, if you want.”  There’s a long pause and Éponine’s head goes _thunk_ against the door.  “All right, you stubborn shit,” she says, without any anger in her tone.  “We can just sit here.”

Grantaire doesn’t say anything, and she goes silent in the hall.  He waits for her to talk again.

She doesn’t.

So Grantaire sits there in the quiet and breathes, eight beats in and four beats out, until he thinks he can make his hands move again, until his legs hold him when he stands up, until he feels less like he’s about to shatter into pieces like a wine glass dropped on concrete, broken beyond salvaging. 

He pulls all the cracked bits together and presses them back into place beneath his skin, and he forces himself to open the door.

Éponine nearly topples through, leaning comfortably against the corner where the door meets the frame, and she rolls to her feet like a cat.  She’s smiling—not the wide and uninhibited grin he’s grown used to over the last few days, but a small, pleased smile, a little hesitant, as if she’s not sure she’s welcome.  She stuffs her phone into the pocket of her jacket and reaches up, showing him her hands and telegraphing every move as she grips his shoulder and gives him one of those friendly, companionable shakes he’s noticed that she’s prone to.

“Hey,” she says.  “You ready to go get lunch?”

Grantaire nods, and they go get lunch.  She complains about how tedious photo editing is and doesn’t say anything about the way he picks over his rice and dissects his dumplings, just nudges a glass of water in his direction, and Grantaire tries to ignore the feeling that he’s standing on the edge of a very high cliff.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> God, please don't hate me. I really do hope to have the rest of this fic finished in a reasonable time frame here--by which I mean, less than two years to the next chapter. Ha, ha.
> 
> I'm done.


End file.
